You are not broken, lazy or stupid

This is the most blunt way I can sum up the many elegant presuppositions of the training program I am in right now.

If you aren't getting what you most want in life (a satisfying relationship, getting to the gym, a new job, self-confidence, etc), despite your efforts, desires and hopes toward getting it - AND if you CAN'T (just for a moment, I know it's hard) assume it's because you are defective, broken, lazy or stupid, what exactly might be at work? If you are an elegant, well-working human being, then what? Why don't you have these things you want so much?

That is the compelling, head-scratching question I can now answer, as I enter the final lap of training (1.5 years) at NLP Marin (www.nlpmarin.com), a little saintly school in the bay area of California that I happened upon by chance a year ago.

I once again find myself studying from masters, at the feet of great teaching, reveling in the learning of it all, the elegant, deeply human, swift and remarkable tools to support folks to get what it is they want most.

I find I can no longer tolerate a coach/client relationship that is judgmental, shaming, blaming or based on "breaking through"; or that attempts to cut away or remove unwanted parts, however subtle that might have been in my training until now. Who am I to tell you how it is for you? You know. We'll find out together. Yes, my role and training is as the one that can see what you can't see, since it's so close and in a blind spot like one's own nose on one's face. I am simply the one that can observe, be curious and ask. The proof is in your experience.

How arrogant to think we can surgically remove an unwanted part so that we can finally be the upstanding person who hope we might be. How incredibly complex, but amazing, is the human being. And how great is the job to offer someone to get what they want most, without cutting anything away at all.

It is with great gratitude that I think of my training, exhausted as I am from a weekend full of it. I thought I'd get some more training under my belt to better work with clients. I got that and also got swept up in a wave of a deeply humanizing body of knowledge.

I am a better human being because of it.